What Happens To Us

Many times in the past, I have written about how I'll end up alone because I just can't find and keep a good woman. Mostly, this is something I attribute to autism, although obesity doesn't help. Now though, I think ending up alone is something I'm actively choosing. This is not because I no longer want family life, but because I am fed up with the sheer aggravation of trying to make it happen. While it has been a number of years since anything unacceptably awful has happened in my relationships, even my more functional recent dating relationships involve so much emotional back-and-forth. Endlessly, I must wait to mention certain subjects, to use terms like boyfriend and girlfriend, to meet family members, to have sex, and everything could fall apart at any moment without anything I've done or not done factoring into it in one way or another. Whether it's the autism or my personally in the first place, I don't know, but I think you must need the patience of a goddamn rock to date, open up, put your heart on the slab,  and have them hand it back to you going, "LOL, never mind," time and again. If I'm choosing to be alone though, I've got to think about what happens to people who never find anyone.

I've written before about how family holidays are the first thing I worry about. Here's what's going to happen. Your parents and other elders will die off until there's only your generation left. Your contemporaries will form their own families and have family holidays with those new families, of which you are not really a part. So you'll have to find a way to deal with the fact that you're going to be alone on Christmas, Thanksgiving, and the like. Personally, I plan to go eat at IHOP and see movies. Then there's the, "Who will take care of me when I'm older," question. As far as I can see, there's a good argument for saving up to pay your own way for a live-in nurse or a good nursing home. That's probably a good rule of thumb about saving anyway. Either be self-sufficient or have the money to pay people because unconditional love isn't to be counted upon.

Much of what I've written in the past on this topic seems like drivel to me when I read it down the line. In an effort to avoid that here, I really am trying to figure out how I'm going to function, having decided to choose a future with the challenges of being alone as part of the package. In many ways, I suppose I'll do what I do now. Cook, smoke, write, run errands, repeat. There will certainly be friends and laughs as I proceed into my future years. Recently, I've become fascinated with the Kenny Rogers song The Gambler. A line in there goes, "Every hand's a winner and every hand's a loser. The best you can hope for is to die in your sleep." Something about that speaks to me. Good fortune may find you and may not find you in whatever ratio there ends up being, but ultimately this is all played out against a bleak and bitter landscape where you're just playing the game every day, marking time until one day, mercifully you break even somewhere in the night.